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After a Lifetime key licensed, I got "There is a physical problem accessing your USB Flash boot device"

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Cannot access your USB Flash boot device
There is a physical problem accessing your USB Flash boot device

Unraid OS No Flash

After licensed I did a DD from pendrive to a virtual disk on a ProxMox VM, I got this message even licensed.

unraid-diagnostics-20250305-1746.zip

  • Community Expert

You cannot use a virtual flash drive

  • Author

Should I use an USB drive plugged permanently?

This should be clarified earlier and/or before someone pay for that.

  • Community Expert
Just now, Juliano said:

Should I use an USB drive plugged permanently?

With Unraid you need a physical flash drive for booting and licensing purposes and it had to be left permanently plugged in.

  • Author

Unbelievable.
In a QC + AI + ML age, using a thumb drive for licensing. This is beyond ridiculous. What a regret!

  • Author

I have used TrueNas for years, and recently my Google Drive backup was zero size, and I do not trust the rclone used there anymore. I heard that your UnRaid was a lot better for that kind of routine, but nowhere and no one said that must run from a pendrive or depending of a plugged one definitively.

Your data does not depend upon the flash drive.  The flash drive is used to boot the OS.  The OS then completely runs from RAM.  It does have to be present, but no writes happen to it unless you change a setting.

 

People tend to think of flash drives as being unreliable, but on any of my servers the flash drive's longevity has always exceeded the lifespan of any SSD or hard drive used for the data.  If the flash does fail, then you're back and running identically with no loss of data on your drives by creating a new one and restoring the backup of /config.  Even if no backup of that folder is available, then you still have no loss of data and basically just have to re-assign your data drives appropriately.  My main server's flash drive is easily the oldest component in there.  12 years and counting.   Nothing else in that server is even close to being that old.

 

Will the necessity of the flash drive change in the future?  Possibly.  But it's not a real hinderance IMO.  But, your concerns are not unique and the flash requirement might change in the future.

  • Community Expert
10 minutes ago, Juliano said:

 but nowhere and no one said that must run from a pendrive 

image.thumb.png.07cd157ce0abb971da3a0e2709ba309a.png




What. 

  • Author

Yeah, I missed that one.

Genius decision to put an entire NAS platform depending on a pendrive.

  • Community Expert
1 minute ago, Juliano said:

Genius decision to put an entire NAS platform depending on a pendrive.

Well, it's been working for thousands of users for almost 20 years, so maybe it was, I still have a couple of servers running on the original 1GB flash drives from 2007.

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